This is the 1982 sequel to the author's earlier The Third World
War: August 1985, published in 1978; it covers much of the same
material but attempts to give a wider perspective rather than only
dealing with the land war in Europe.

If the thesis of Red Storm Rising was that the Atlantic bridge
must be maintaned, the thesis of this book is very much si vis pacem,
para bellum: you can't trust those darn Commies, pacifists are at
best useful idiots and at worse traitors, trade unionists are worse,
Europe needs a unified military, BUY MORE TANKS!

Well, up to a point, Sir John. The fact that he needs to tweak so many
things to make his scenario work, from a unified European foreign
policy, via Israel suddenly detaching itself from the American teat to
no benefit to itself in order to make American policy in the Middle
East a bit more sane, to Ireland abandoning its more offensive laws
based on Catholic doctrine, tends rather to undermine his argument
even on the basis on which he was writing in the 1980s. Well, yes,
if we'd militarised Europe and built a conventional force that could
withstand Soviet attack, then if a Soviet attack had come we could
have had a better chance of doing so. But we didn't waste all that
money on buying more and more military hardware and taking people out
of the workforce to train them as soldiers-in-waiting, and we still
did all right.

On the other hand, with the Middle East and Irish problems wiped out
with the stroke of a pen, why can't the Soviet problem be wiped out
the same way? By the time the clock rolls round to the outbreak of war
in 1985, the Western combatants are almost unrecognisably altered, but
the Soviets are exactly as they were being predicted to be.

Look, I'm a wargamer. I enjoy doing accurate simulations, working out
tactical and strategic problems, and so on. I can even
fantasise about what the Royal Navy would have done with an unlimited budget.
But that doesn't mean, as the accusation has sometimes been made, that
I want the real thing! Quite the opposite: my experience and that of
most wargamers I've talked to is that once you've fought
realistically over the world a few times and seen how much damage
has been done in your wake, you are likely to find yourself (like most
actual soldiers) increasingly determined to make sure it doesn't
happen. So when I see Hackett advocating in real life measures that
would seem likely significantly to have increased the probability of
war (by making it easier for NATO to attack the USSR, and thus
provoking the latter to attack before those measures were ready); when
I see the way that in this book the war is used to make all sorts of
international situations better, to the extent that it's regarded in
the end as basically a good thing; I get annoyed. When I'm gaming, I
can casually wipe away a problem because I'm explicitly building an
alternative history; Hackett's talking about what he thinks ought to
happen in real life.

Anyway. Sorry about that. Hackett was a general, not a politician.

But apart from that, how was the book? Well, it's pretty dry stuff.
That's fine, at least for me, but it makes the small excursions into
actual character moments feel somewhat out of place.

Projections of the effectiveness of weapons (including on the NATO
side now-forgotten failures like the Assault Breaker project and even
Nimrod AEW, and on the Soviet side the MiG-25 and Yak-38) are wildly
optimistic. There's not a huge amount of new equipment (except for one
or two items that were under development in 1978 when the first
version of the book was written), but the Soviets have made
unprecedented (and hugely expensive) improvements to their military
tactics. Even so, NATO gets all the luck, while the Soviets go
horribly wrong as soon as they deviate from The Plan, and various of
their pilots and naval captains defect nearly before the war has
started, with land forces following not long afterwards; meanwhile
their Eastern European allies simply flee from the fight.

If your military's problem is that it doesn't have the money to
recruit more people, allowing women to be recruited does not help.

I, even I who have happily played in wargaming settings that included
the Welsh Star Empire, find this book perverse: the prospect of war
seems to be something the author actively welcomes (if sufficient
armament is readied beforehand), because only thus can the Soviet
menace be defeated and (nearly) everything become puppies and rainbows
thereafter.

I do recall saying to Dave Langford after the collapse of the Soviet Union that he ought to apologise to the General for saying that the ending of the book (where the Warsaw Pact just goes away after the nuking of Kiev in retaliation for the nuking of Birmingham) was a little unrealistic.

The bit that I find unrealistic in retrospect (being more interested in the political than the technical) is the idea that the Warsaw Pact could ever have been brought to the starting line in the first place. Herding cats would not have been in it and that ought to have been obvious at the time. I once owned (but never played) a copy of SPI's THE NEXT WAR and looking back I can't believe that we ever thought such a scenario likely. 1979 and all that was a very different proposition from 1939 and all that.

When someone invents parachronic travel to alternate time lines I will probably be proved wrong. Again.

Criticism with hindsight is something I'm mostly trying to avoid. Yes, in practice, we know much more now about the state of the Soviet armed forces in the 1980s than Hackett did at the time, and some of his assumptions (e.g. that the mass of Soviet armour actually had enough of a fuel and ammunition supply to reach the Atlantic) were reasonable at the time even if they later turned out to have been false. The strange thing to me is that, given his starting state of knowledge, he still pushed all sorts of things in different directions (making the Soviets much more technically competent than was generally assumed, but also beefing up NATO). It ends up feeling like not "what a war might be like if it started tomorrow" but "what a war should be like if you do what I say".

Someone should do an analysis of the degree to which the professional military and espionage apparatus 'talked up' the Soviet threat to justify their own budgets. I will admit a prejudice in the other direction. The work should start now, while the memories are fresh and people can still give personal testaments, though I doubt it will achieve any sort of balanced final result until we are all long dead and it is the 'judgement of history'.

And the politicians too. As with the completely invented media image of the monolithic Al-Qaeda with total control over its members, there's lots of political benefit in being able to say "there's a scary enemy over there, so we need to restrict things to keep you safe from them".